15 Reasons Why Your Food Prices Are About To Start Soaring

Did you know that the U.S. state that produces the most vegetables is going through the worst drought it has ever experienced and that the size of the total U.S. cattle herd is now the smallest that it has been since 1951? Just the other day, a CBS News article boldly declared that "food prices soar as incomes stand still", but the truth is that this is only just the beginning. If the drought that has been devastating farmers and ranchers out west continues, we are going to see prices for meat, fruits and vegetables soar into the stratosphere. Already, the federal government has declared portions of 11 states to be "disaster areas", and California farmers are going to leave half a million acres sitting idle this year because of the extremely dry conditions.

Sadly, experts are telling us that things are probably going to get worse before they get better (if they ever do). As you will read about below, one expert recently told National Geographic that throughout history it has been quite common for that region of North America to experience severe droughts that last for decades. In fact, one drought actually lasted for about 200 years. So there is the possibility that the drought that has begun in the state of California may not end during your entire lifetime.

This drought has gotten so bad that it is starting to get national attention. Barack Obama visited the Fresno region on Friday, and he declared that "this is going to be a very challenging situation this year, and frankly, the trend lines are such where it's going to be a challenging situation for some time to come."

According to NBC News, businesses across the region are shutting down, large numbers of workers are leaving to search for other work, and things are already so bad that it "calls to mind the Dust Bowl of the 1930s"...

In the state's Central Valley — where nearly 40 percent of all jobs are tied to agriculture production and related processing — the pain has already trickled down. Businesses across a wide swath of the region have shuttered, casting countless workers adrift in a downturn that calls to mind the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

If you will recall, there have been warnings that Dust Bowl conditions were going to return to the western half of the country for quite some time.

Now the mainstream media is finally starting to catch up.

And of course these extremely dry conditions are going to severely affect food prices. The following are 15 reasons why your food bill is going to start soaring...

Given that California is one of the largest agricultural regions in the world, the effects of any drought, never mind one that could last for centuries, are huge. About 80 percent of California's freshwater supply is used for agriculture. The cost of fruits and vegetables could soar, says Cantu. "There will be cataclysmic impacts."

#5 Mike Wade, the executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition, recently explained which crops he believes will be hit the hardest...

Hardest hit would be such annual row crops as tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, cantaloupes, garlic, peppers and corn. Wade said consumers can also expect higher prices and reduced selection at grocery stores, particularly for products such as almonds, raisins, walnuts and olives.

#6 As I discussed in a previous article, the rest of the nation is extremely dependent on the fruits and vegetables grown in California. Just consider the following statistics regarding what percentage of our produce is grown in the state...

-99 percent of the artichokes

-44 percent of asparagus

-two-thirds of carrots

-half of bell peppers

-89 percent of cauliflower

-94 percent of broccoli

-95 percent of celery

-90 percent of the leaf lettuce

-83 percent of Romaine lettuce

-83 percent of fresh spinach

-a third of the fresh tomatoes

-86 percent of lemons

-90 percent of avocados

-84 percent of peaches

-88 percent of fresh strawberries

-97 percent of fresh plums

#7 Of course it isn't just agriculture which will be affected by this drought. Just consider this chilling statement by Tim Quinn, the executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies...

"There are places in California that if we don’t do something about it, tens of thousands of people could turn on their water faucets and nothing would come out."

#8 The Sierra Nevada snowpack is only about 15 percent of what it normally is. As the New York Times recently explained, this is going to be absolutely devastating for Californians when the warmer months arrive...

Experts offer dire warnings. The current drought has already eclipsed previous water crises, like the one in 1977, which a meteorologist friend, translating into language we understand as historians, likened to the “Great Depression” of droughts. Most Californians depend on the Sierra Nevada for their water supply, but the snowpack there was just 15 percent of normal in early February.

#9 The underground aquifers that so many California farmers depend upon are being drained at a staggering rate...

Pumping from aquifers is so intense that the ground in parts of the valley is sinking about a foot a year. Once aquifers compress, they can never fill with water again.

It’s no surprise Tom Willey wakes every morning with a lump in his throat. When we ask which farmers will survive the summer, he responds quite simply: those who dig the deepest and pump the hardest.

#10 According to an expert interviewed by National Geographic, the current drought in the state of California could potentially last for 200 years or more as some mega-droughts in the region have done in the past...

California is experiencing its worst drought since record-keeping began in the mid 19th century, and scientists say this may be just the beginning. B. Lynn Ingram, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California at Berkeley, thinks that California needs to brace itself for a megadrought—one that could last for 200 years or more.

#11 Much of the western U.S. has been exceedingly dry for an extended period of time, and this is hurting huge numbers of farmers and ranchers all the way from Texas to the west coast...

The western United States has been in a drought that has been building for more than a decade, according to climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Ranchers in the West are selling off their livestock," Patzert said. "Farmers all over the Southwest, from Texas to Oregon, are fallowing in their fields because of a lack of water. For farmers and ranchers, this is a painful drought.”

#12 The size of the U.S. cattle herd has been shrinking for seven years in a row, and it is now the smallest that it has been since 1951. But our population has more than doubled since then.

#13 Extremely unusual weather patterns are playing havoc with crops all over the planet right now. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Lizzie Bennett...

Peru, Venezuela, and Bolivia have experienced rainfall heavy enough to flood fields and rot crops where they stand. Volcanic eruptions in Ecuador are also creating problems due to cattle ingesting ash with their feed leading to a slow and painful death.

Parts of Australia have been in drought for years affecting cattle and agricultural production.

Large parts of the UK are underwater, and much of that water is sea water which is poisoning the soil. So wet is the UK that groundwater is so high it is actually coming out of the ground and adding to the water from rivers and the sea. With the official assessment being that groundwater flooding will continue until MAY, and that’s if it doesn’t rain again between now and then. The River Thames is 65 feet higher than normal in some areas, flooding town after town as it heads to the sea.

While the government says prices are up 6.4 percent since 2011, chicken is up 18.4 percent, ground beef is up 16.8 percent and bacon has skyrocketed up 22.8 percent, making it a holiday when it's on sale.

#15 As I have written about previously, median household income has fallen for five years in a row. So average Americans are going to have to make their food budgets stretch more than they ever have before as this drought drags on.

If the drought does continue to get worse, small agricultural towns all over California are going to die off.

The farms in and around Mendota are dying of thirst. The signs are everywhere. Orchards with trees lying on their sides, as if shot. Former farm fields given over to tumbleweeds. Land and cattle for sale, cheap.

Large numbers of agricultural workers continue to hang on, hoping that somehow there will be enough work for them. But as Evelyn Nieves recently observed, panic is starting to set in...

Off-season, by mid-February, idled workers are clearly anxious. Farmworkers and everyone else who waits out the winter for work (truckers, diesel providers, packing suppliers and the like) are nearing the end of the savings they squirrel away during the season. The season starts again in March, April at the latest, but no one knows who will get work when the season begins, or how much.

People are scared, panicked even.

I did not write this article so that you would panic.

Yes, incredibly hard times are coming. If you will recall, the 1930s were also a time when the United States experienced extraordinarily dry weather conditions and a tremendous amount of financial turmoil. We could very well be entering a similar time period.

Worrying about this drought is not going to change anything. Instead of worrying, we should all be doing what we can to store some things up while food is still relatively cheap. Our grandparents and our great-grandparents that lived during the days of the Great Depression knew the wisdom of having a well-stocked food pantry, and it would be wise to follow their examples.

Please share this article with as many people as you can. The United States has never faced anything like this during most of our lifetimes. We need to shake people out of their "normalcy bias" and get them to understand that big changes are coming.

Those of us who have lived in California for awhile, and whose memories and attention spans exceed five minutes; will recall several "worst droughts in history" here. In fact, we had a drought that was just as bad the last time Governor Moonbeam was in office.

Every crisis is always "the end of the world" until it isn't.

In a couple years we'll be seeing flooding and mudslides again, and everyone will be wailing about El Nino...

"We basically supply the conditions of springtime, not summer, not winter, for 12 months a year,” explains Hessel.

The company is developing a series of growing machines for different kinds of produce, and currently sells GrowTech 2000, a standard 40-foot container that uses a specially developed fluorescent light and computers that monitor oxygen, light, carbon dioxide, humidity and temperature levels.

GrowTech 2000 offers the best solution for growers in cold climates where land and labor are relatively expensive. Another version, GrowTech 2500, was designed for climates with more available land and sunlight, using a more traditional greenhouse structure to take advantage of the natural light from the outdoors."

"At around $180,000 for a greenhouse version, and nearly double that for a container using artificial light, the hydroponic platforms can produce from 150,000 to 400,000 heads of lettuce per year, but can be an expensive proposition, admits Hessel. Then again, the system can lead to a reduction of up to 80% of the costs for heating and labor, two of the most serious costs in the greenhouse industry, according to the company’s figures."

Actually walnuts grow pretty well in hydroponic systems, though you have to kinda 'bansai' the trees down to about 6-8' to balance yield over physical space. Almonds I've no idea about; never seen, tried nor read about that one. I'd hazard a guess that it's possible, given the structure of the trees, but I wouldn't like to guess about how productive you could get them. Some nuts for sure but maybe not too many.

Dwarf oranges (some small varieties of all citrus types, really) work OK in hydroponic/aquaponic setups, though. And there are smaller apple and pear tree varieties that can work. Plums seem OK. As do apricots.

So there's a bunch of stuff you can do. But not, as you quite rightly say, everything.

Bingo. I think hydroponics are bassackwards. How is the water usage compared to current farming methods? Water only just doesn't make sense when there is a shortage of the preferred medium. What am I missing?

Additionally, why do we use water to flush feces, and urine?

I think the permaculture people have proven, and more sustainable methods with Food Forests. Check out Bill Mollison, and Geoff Lawton.

Between 1/2 and 1/10th, depending on technique and crop, as it happens. A properly designed system only loses water only through incorporation into the plants and transpiration through them. Both of which occur at similar rates to conventional agriculture.

Start up costs, if you're using new hardware throughout, not McGuyver-ing as much as possible, is high, however.

Yes, water usage is much lower. I do different forms of aquaponics and this is the last bed still up and this was from December so it's twice as overgrown as now: http://1drv.ms/M7JEC8 A local outfit does this on a commercial scale and almost all their stuff is a closed loop. If I was to use nothing but rainwater I could run easily run 10 tanks like this just on runoff alone for the year using a cistern. And this includes the tanks I grow the tilapia's feed(duckweed) in.

Nice one, dude! I just pulled my current domestic lettuce, etc crop to do a deep clean (seen a few greenfly on the chives, as the kids left the door open), so the bed is empty, but I've been getting ~20Ibs of lettuce, watercress, rocket and chives per week out of a 9'x4' bed in a greenhouse through the UK winter. Heating it with compost and a 76W frost heater, plus about £30 of mixed christmas lights and 12v LED strings (which run off the household battery bank as a maintenance load).

Mostly spinach and watercress going in next: fast, nutricious and entirely grown from saved seeds. You can't live on hunted rabbits (deficient in a whole bunch of amino acids), nor pigeons - both of which is about all you can count on in quantity here - but add spinach, watercress and some foraged nettles, etc and you can.

Then you have the conservatory on the back of the house, which does a good job of tomatoes, chillis, cumin, fenugreek, etc, etc.

You can hedge by buying Potash stocks. Arable land is a finite resource, and if the distribution of it changes with climate change, farmers will need to increase yield, and protect existing crops against drought, with potash.

However, world governments will not allow food prices to get too high.

This is called a culling. By whom? Mother Nature, the biggest bitch around and she doesn't give a fuck about who falls. Less fruits, vegetables, grains, and protein = more malnutrition, lower quality adults and offspring. Watch out neighbors, a human refugee migration is headed your way.

"It's well-recognized that smoking cigarettes can cause lung cancer. What isn't clear is exactly what it is in the cigarette or its smoke that causes it. Interestingly, while it may seem obvious that added chemicals would be prime culprits, research suggests it may be something else entirely.

This "something else" in turn could also have potential ramifications for our food supply, and might be an indicator of potential carcinogenicity in genetically engineered foods as well as tobacco, although there's no evidence of such a link as of yet.

The factor I'm talking about is polonium-210—a highly radioactive element1 that releases alpha particles as it decays. It's also chemically toxic.2 While alpha particles cannot penetrate deeply into your body, they can cause serious damage to cells they do come into contact with.

While naturally present in small amounts in the environment, one of the primary sources of exposure is via calcium phosphate fertilizers, used on tobacco fields and food crops respectively."

I no longer make important decisions in life based upon the possibility that someone may just drag me down with guns and a cage.

I tried waking the masses around me, but found the beer and football haze to be too much to fight through. I then took to and succeeded in government petitioning to allow citizens to vote to reclaim 1% of their income, but found myself on the political radar. I argue with revenue generating cops for non-violent code enforcement, while understanding I may end up on the wrong end of a steroid ridden bully.

To each their own and I wish I knew of the most effective means to gain back my liberty, but can't seem to locate the best possible path.

In the end, sometimes we become the useful idiot to show an example of the police state around us and maybe a few more open their eyes. It still won't stop me from living the life I can, while avoiding the arbitrary caging of government by fighting and kicking any way I can.

Those cases are pretty questionable. They involved people in towns or developments that had rules restricting vegetable gardening, and the people ignored them. They weren't arrested by Feds but by local cops; for ignoring citations for breaking the ordinances, not for growing vegetables. I know this because I read those stories too, and carefully revisited Minneapolis' gardening ordinances. Pretty much the only restrictions here involve growing plants on the boulevard, which can't be tall enough to block visibility; and growing legal plants, tending them, and removing invasive weeds.

People also get into trouble for putting up greenhouse structures that are too large or don't meet zoning requirements in some way. And they get in trouble for having their own Farmer's Markets and drawing a crowd in their yards, selling vegies and annoying their neighbors.

Since I was planning to till up most of my front yard, build garden boxes and plant vegetables here in inner Minneapolis, I reviewed this carefully and checked out the cases we all heard about. They weren't busted for growing vegetables. They were busted for ignoring the rules and pissing everybody off. I don't agree with the rules and it would probably drive my residency decisions. I won't live anyplace with a Management Association, for one thing. But growing vegetables in your front yard is just fine in Minneapolis as long as you follow basic stewardship practices, which you should be doing anyway unless you're an asshole neighbor.

It's kind of a double fucking, really. Inflation + food price increases. Not to mention, with the "bio" part of "biofuel" about to get way, way pricey, along with already record high crude prices for the season, it should be a real interesting summer/fall.

Probably joe average sheeple will look at this article and realize none of these vegetables are on the McDollar menu so they'd figure this inflation won't affect them. So I guess I won't email this article out, seeing its effectiveness would be for naught. However, I'm planning a bigger garden this year and hope my judicious use of my well water will see me through. Living here can be really strange. No one seems overly concerned at all and are using water normally. I wonder what will happen if nothing comes out of the fawcet.

And when the American population realizes all their food is radioactive:

'Gov’t Test: Cattle feed at California dairy farm had 300 pCi/kg of radioactive cesium after Fukushima; 9-month gap between when sample harvested and when received by lab — New UC Berkeley study reveals over 3,500 pCi/kg of cesium deposited on nearby roadside'

Agreed, although the 'combo' part is much scarier for people that live in that area. Or around any nuclear facility, for that matter:

'CNN: Alarm due to radiation spike brings ’1st-of-its-kind’ response at US nuclear site — Inspections cancelled, no one able to enter facility due to ‘high radiation’ levels — Reuters: Plans got called off over ‘safety thing’ — Gov’t: ‘Pretty sure’ we know where leak is — Local TV calls it ‘emergency’'

No question, bioaccumulation sucks, and the faster the radiation bioaccumulates from multiple sources, well . . .

"Bioaccumulation is the gradual build up over time of a chemical in a living organism. This occurs either because the chemical is taken up faster than it can be used, or because the chemical cannot be broken down for use by the organism (that is, the chemical cannot be metabolized)."

they've been bulldozing rainforests at the rate of 4800 acres/hour for the last 10 years. emerging markets are dying in large part because these commodity prices are being crushed because the commodity bubbles popped. take a look at the 10 year charts on corn, beans, coffee, anything else you want and you will conclude it will be a long time before ag prices get back to where they were when greenspan had the pedal to the metal:

There are ways to bring that figure down some but they'd be impossibly expensive (with 7.2 billion people depending on rapid progress, anyway) and you'd still have to take a lot of the formerly productive land out of use for 10-18 years, even based on the most optimistic numbers I've seen. So yeah...

Yeah, I've been coming up to speed the last few days on the local stupidity making things worse out there. In the 1930s it was poor soil management and over-use. Now it's poor water management under the guise of protecting what are basically.... bait fish. (I don't know what else to call those utterly unremarkable fish- they look like they deserve to be put on a hook and trolled through the water behind a boat).

Oh yeh ? You sound like the guy telling the US public to eat iPads. Dumb fuck.

It's the percentage of the US food production that will be impacted by the drought in CA, that is very material. It is very real, and yes inflation is about to be felt in things we need rather than things we don't... like iPads. But don't worry ... your friends at the Fed will just print moar... and it will be Ok.

You stupid fucking clown. This is a non story. Wanna wager nothing comes of this? Have you had a conversation with anybody who lives in California? You just read synder and assume he is providing you a realistic picture? Like all of his other bullshit meant for people imbued with iqs of 40?

Kito, I regret to inform you that you are wildly off base here, as the California drought IS a VERY real story, and will almost certainly have a very real impact on produce prices and availability later this year --- and the seriousness of the situation has NOTHING to do with the public pronouncements and grandstanding of Obozo and Governor Moonbeam:

Kito, the impact of the California drought will not be solely due to the impact on the overall % of US crops grown in California (although it is a significant %, and as you know, prices are set at the margin), but with the percentages of SPECIFIC crops which are grown in California, such as 40+% of all US-grown celery, 50+% of all US-grown strawberries, 80+% of all US-grown apricots, and 95+% of all US-grown almonds.

And don't forget, this drought is not limited to California, but is heavily impacting Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of several other states as well. It'll be very interesting to see the water supply fights between LA and San Diego and Las Vegas, for example.

I've already stocked up on many pounds of almonds and dried California apricots (FAR superior to the Turkish variety), frozen for long-term storage, as I expect them to be far higher in price a year from now, if they are available at all.

"california has a 2 trillion dollar gdp and agriculture makes up about 2 percent of it. 2 percent."

Think this through logically.

1. That GDP number assumes a lot of fantasy bullshit about state debt ever being repaid anywhere close to par, let alone par + the IR.

2. If CA (and other western state) agriculture goes to shit, that is going to seriously affect your food budget. Now, naturally, the whole "substitutionary effect" thing is going to come into play (people will buy less fruit and veg), but that resulting savings has to go somewhere, so the price of everything not fruit/veg related is probably going to go up in price (simple supply/demand curve). You can't escape it.

I think the thing about Michael Snyder that really hits home is that he rarely ever publishes these types of articles. So when you get a rare glimpse of one of them it just makes the hair on the back of your balls stand up. This is key to not only a good author, but their ability to drive a message home. I just hope he keeps this style and does not become the usual doom porn whore that we get overloaded with so frequently.

MsCreant you are missing a lot, with regards to this, no offense. As someone who has been here a while, the content on here has gone predominantly yahoo finance with a huge side of Glenn Beck. Take a look at the Switzerland air force thread. I threw out an idea. Take a look at the Bruce Krasting thread over the weekend. I tried to dig him out of a lame article and engage in some real subject matter and he punted. So I am not just whining, I am mostly whining.

I went and looked. Have you emailed it to them? Links to things substantiating it? I put up a story OT about Barclays and eventually it made it up, but with more investigation posted with it, not just a repost of the story about the data being sold.

Better yet, write your own article and submit it. See what they do.

I got one published here once.

There is a doomer audience here. I am one of them, though I buy into the Long Emergency with occasional waterfalls.

The other problem is that in the beginning of ZH, there was plenty to write about, in addition to posting many MSM articles. Now, .gov has muzzled most of the MSM, we all know the root of the problems, and there are fewer analysts writing anything that someone else hasn't already said.

It's like Drudge. He nailed the Clinton scandals, then as they died down, there was less for him to write about, and it became a more mainstream site. Then when some good scandal pops up that no one else will touch, he'll focus on it until it, too, goes away, or he gets the 'phone call'. ZH was on top of everything all along, and now everyone is just waiting to see what collapses next. And when it does, the Tylers will be all over it and we will all come here to get the scoop.

Here is the bigger thing (to me anyway)...and I don't know how much ZH would want to write about this, although I would respect the shit out of them if they opened themselves and their underlying theme to some introspection...

Here is what I wrote the other day. "The fed is tapering. The stock market is rallying and the bond market is steady, as is the dollar. Soon we will get to see whether foreign CB treasury purchases are stepping in for the fed as Yellen backs away. If other CB's step in and pick up the slack and the fed exits QE this year (employment be damned) and the markets hold up....can we say the fed managed to stick the greatest landing in monetary policy history? Like I said, forget employment, the fed, like everyone else, could give a shit about the dying middle class.

If the fed pulls it off people like Schiff (take the fed away and you lose the bond market) and ZH (It's the flow, not stock that matters) will be left scratching their heads at best, and more likely getting some serious ridicule.

Also, it would indicate that all this geopolitical tension is really theatre, and we are truly witnessing a globally coordinated monetary policy in action."

Basically the fed is currently proving us ALL wrong. Granted, the economy still sucks, but we all know this was never about the economy. But still, they are currently in the works of pulling off what we all thought was never possible, or at the least delaying the shit out of it.

Gold and commodities lately are the one little fly in the ointment, and should be watched. But it's too bad we stopped self evaluation on here and pivoted to remedial doom porn for dummies.

Kalifornia has always had a water problem.
Its overbuilt, over farmed , and overpopulated.
This one is being exacerbated by the Feds refusing to divert water because of some endangered fish species.
Causing this problem, then claiming to help by throwing money at their crony's again.
Kalifornia surely is a man made disaster, just not a climate change one.

Hey, since you're out there, could you keep an eye on Bill Maher for us? He's griping about paying the taxes to support that socialist utopian state, even though it's exactly how he always dreamed it would be.

That sonofabitch STAYS in California. FOREVER. Do not let him out. Besides, better his money paying for it than yours, right?

If you could look after that for us it would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

1. The Fed has printed more than $3 Trillion out of thin air, and added it to an adjusted monetary base of $800 Billion. THIS IS INFLATIONARY, BY DEFINITION, even in the face of the common notion that it is NOT inflationary until it hits circulation.

2. Monetary inflation is America's most important export, and has been for more than 30 years.

3. Other nations are finally waking up to facts #1 and #2, having been subjected to their own bouts of inflation which had been blamed by the MSM and various stupid pundits on domestic mismanagement and hot-money flows.

4. The world is waking up to the fact that the era of dollar-hegemony is ending, and the role of the USD as reserve currency is ending.

5. In light of facts #1-4 above, the inflation is finally coming home, as hard-money advocates have been telling us for the past decade that it ultimately must.

6. TPTB, including the Fed, the one-party political system, the fucktards on Wall Street (all of whom should jump and right fucking now), the BIS, BOE, etc, are desperate to maintain their wealth-stripping monopolies and so are using the MSM to try to convince us ITS THE FUCKING WEATHER.

There is no reason it can't be both the Fed and the weather. They're not mutually exclusive. We're just as good at mismanaging our natural resources as we are at mismanaging our money supply. Throw a little weather stress into the situation and the mismanagement becomes apparent.

Median income is up only 1 percent a year. For Singer, that makes it hard to save for college tuition - which has been rising 6 percent to 8 percent every year for five decades.

"The price of college is terrifying and so we're looking at cheaper schools or scholarships, I hope," she said. "You know, 'Run faster in track.' That will really help me out a lot."

Many are concerned that while economists paint a benign picture, middle-class families are quietly struggling.

"The disconnect is severe, because it's the economists that make policy but it's the people who have to live with the outcome of that policy and that disconnect is growing to the point where I think it has to break soon," Colas said.

supply/demand idiosyncrasies always exist for commodities; the currency that is monopolized at the point of a gun as 'legal tender' is what is paid with for these commodities, though, and its supply continues to grow exponentially. Looking to get long in various commodities here, through ETFs probably. CORN looks like it might have turned around with a bullish engulfing monthly recently, and coffee exploding higher, crude oil looks like it'll be going towards 108 + and IMO towards 120 TA-wise.

It's already spring, theres been no winter. Temps in the 70's and 80's daily. Birds and plants very confused soon to be very thirsty then very dead. The next fire season will be a bitch but I do get to sunbath daily.